There are no private flood insurance providers in the US. It's all a government program. This is why when it rains and your house gets filled with regular water, the insurance companies don't cover that. Wind and other "storm" damage are covered.

You could easily run TrueCrypt or other encryption software and sync that file that you've made (assuming a file container). It'd make syncing slightly more of a hassle (have to dismount the file, then wait for it to sync, etc.), but totally do-able.

I wrote a short story about this. I spent some time looking into the effect of flooding the market with gold (hey, it was my story, right?). Would mess everything up right quick. You could make a fortune on the short-sell kind of thing, but at what cost? Especially since gold is one of those "safe" investments.

Of course it was a story. I won't tell you how it ends, but now that I think about it, it might have been a better story if I had pursued those consequences instead of the ending I did go with. That really does sound interesting. Of course, I'm older how. Who knows?

I've not programmed properly since the 90's. The closest I get to coding at all is web stuff now, though I don't dare call it programming. I understood the summary perfectly. The OP just might be ignorant. Or an idiot. Or both.

I know California has this law, but in a more general sense, a lot of these warnings are based on litigation and the fear thereof.

Tangent:

I'm a technical writer. There is a long history of this kind of thing in the vast majority of technical documents that are provided to the end user. It's not looked upon kindly by a lot of technical writers and academics who teach technical writing. If you're looking for citations, you can check out "Writing and Technique" by David Dobrin. He dissects the "user manual" for his coffee grinder (IIRC), which includes such warnings as "Do not use outside." Now, we all know these rules are meaningless, day to day. You could use your coffee grinder outside for a decade with no ill effects, unless it was raining. Or a walnut fell from a tree into the grinder while it was running. Or some other wildly unlikely scenario. But the corporate lawyer needs to cover the company.

He argues that this isn't technical writing at all. I'd probably concur. And yet, here we are. These warnings are plastered everywhere and, yet, people ignore them. Or laugh at them and go through their life not killing themselves with their coffee grinders. And people wonder why the documentation is often useless and filled with such warnings.

A co-worker bought a chainsaw. The manual was entirely filled with warnings. Completely. Now a chainsaw isn't exactly a safe piece of equipment, and so some warnings, maybe even all of them, had a point. But there were no instructions on how to use the thing.

I don't want to blame the lawyer. I can't imagine they like being paranoid, they are just protecting the company.

Mr. Hitchens was a professional, which is why he was prolific. It's certainly not difficult to write at a high rate and quality when you've been doing it for decades. There are plenty of examples from sci-fi (Asimov) to popular (King) downright "literary" (Burgess) who were prolific and wrote really well (much of the time).

Also, well, he was a journalist. And journalists often have editors. These help. A lot.

That's the point... it's not just a factory here and there. Unless you've got a factory that can take beach sand and petroleum in one end and pump iPad's out the other, you need an entire community to work around your factory to keep things flowing. That community is pretty much gone.

I don't care. I've had the same DVD at home for 2 months that I haven't had a chance to watch (maybe tomorrow). This will affect me little if at all. I just won't have to worry about moving that DVD mailer around.

False dichotomy. Straw man. Whatever. Gates isn't just a Christian going to church and doing nothing, nor is he taking the idea of working tirelessly in the background for little change seriously. He's making the most change that he can and driving results. It might not be my business what Steve Jobs supports, but he's not being a good supporter if he isn't doing more (if he can being, admittedly, sick and all) to bring more awareness to his issues.

Bill Gates is performing charity and telling people what he's doing. If you have someone with the public face backing that up with cash, that's huge. Better him that who? Bono. What?

Maybe he changed. I mean, what is he gonna do next, realistically, besides give his fortune away? Run for president? What a waste for little return on investment.

I talk to the girl at subway a few days a week. I don't even know her name (no name-tag). I have little personal investment in her. I mean, sure, I hope she's doing well, but not any more than any other near stranger.

On IRC and other internet forums, there are a couple people I talk to regularly; mostly just...whatever. I don't touch base with each twitter follower every day. That would be...burdensome. Even if I only have 300 something. Who are mostly spam-bots.

I do not like to get my philosophy from t-shirts. However, I did see one that said "Beware of stupid people in large groups." If you want a little more fanciful take on it, watch a zombie movie. The paranoia is infectious. Hang out with one of them for 10 minutes and listen to them seriously. Take their (largely invisible to them) presuppositions as true. You will be scared.

Of course I don't know enough tea-partiers to determine their average intelligence, but the ones I do know are loud, boorish, and ignorant of all the facts. They are just like the rest of humanity.